Archive for December, 2003

In the last two days, I’ve received three spam comments on the blog. It took about 10 minutes to clean them up. This is a pretty low-profile weblog. If the spammers are hitting me with multiple spam comments per day, I can only imagine what people with high volume sites are experiencing.

I’ve noticed that many blogs have turned off the comment feature. I’d hate to do that because that would leave trackback as the only other way to leave feedback. Trackback only works if you have a blog of your own. Lots of people without their own blogs are reading other people’s blogs. How would they be able to respond with feedback?

Don Box writes about new keyboard offerings from Microsoft. I’m not sure if he likes them or not. I will say that they appeal to me. Microsoft has removed the Insert key.

There are historical reasons for keeping the Insert key. The primary reason is its use for copy and paste. Ctl-Ins used to be the standard for copy and Shift-Ins was the standard for paste. This has since been standardized across several OSs with the Ctl-C and Ctl-V key combinations.

Another use of the Insert key, especially in text-based editors, was to insert spaces in lines. I can’t imagine any modern programs needing to insert repetitive spaces. Every modern editor supports use of the Tabs or automatic indenting, which is much more portable when printing text to printers with non-proportional fonts. The reason the insert key was used before was because the space bar would overwrite text. This left the Insert key as the only way to insert blank room for additinal text to be inserted.

This leads me to my third usage of the Insert key, and the one that makes me happy to see it disappear. In modern editors, the Insert key is used to toggle between “insert” and “overwrite” mode. The default for most programs, and I’m sure the mode that most of use exclusively, is the insert mode. Today, when we overwrite text, we simply highlight the text we want to replace before we start typing.

However, the Insert key still functions as the mode toggle in many editors. Frequently, I overextend and hit the Insert key when I mean to catch the Delete or the Home key. I start typing and don’t realize until I look up from my paper that I’ve just wiped away three lines of text because I happened to have accidentally toggled into overwrite mode.

I, for one, will be happy to see the Insert key disappear from my next keyboard.

Don then goes on to say that we should also remove the Scroll Lock, Pause, and CAPS LOCK keys. I must object to removing the CAPS LOCK key. I just used it twice to type this sentence. As a touch-typist who needs to frequently type constant names and/or codes that are all capital letters, I need the use of the CAPS LOCK key. Without it, my typing speed goes way down because of the need to consistently hold down the shift key.

Do I accidentally hit the caps lock sometimes? Yes. Isn’t that the same complaint I made about the Insert key? Yes. However, the Insert key caused me to undo and have to retype information. Accidental use of the CAPS LOCK key is fixed by the editor with a “convert to lower case” function.

I am ambivalent about removing the Scroll Lock and Pause keys. I did use these when I was doing REXX programming in OS/2. However, all operating systems today have functional replacements for these two keys, more or less.

In an ideal world, all business objects would be synchronized with each other. With CSLA.NET, what would be a good way to handle notifying other objects that an object has changed?

The best idea I can think of is to have a central “change message” queue. In its simplest form, all clients would register with the central message server. When they receive events, they would determine whether the message was meant for them or not. If it was, they can iniitate whatever action is necessary to deal with the change.